In the rapidly expanding, kaleidoscopic world of ecommerce content marketing, there will always be some concepts that stand the test of time. We believe the humble gift guide is one of them.

What started out as a semi-precious, tangible object (with real pages) has quickly evolved into an online marketing staple: something that can be perused at any time, in any place, on any device.

Which is why, if your brand does have a digital edition of your gift guide, it’s always worth shouting about. After all, consumers won't proactively search for your guide, so it’s up to you to get it noticed.

For this blog post, we’ve taken a look at the way in which eight savvy brands are doing just that this Christmas. From email marketing to social media to on-site content, for each example we’ve included an image of the gift guide promotion in question, followed by a snapshot of the guide that appears once it’s been clicked.

From inflation to business rates increases to a weak pound, there’s no denying that 2017 has been a bit of a mixed bag for retailers. However, ecommerce marketers should nevertheless be preparing themselves for a flurry of festive shoppers over the next month and a half.

Whilst most of you will no doubt already have your Christmas campaigns firmly in place (many of you will have already sent them out), it’s worth thinking about how you can make doubly sure everyone who has shopped with you in Christmases gone by revisits you over the next couple of months to spend again.

According to research carried out by Retail Week and ICM, the average UK shopper will spend over £400 on Christmas-related shopping this year. Moreover, around 83 per cent of those shoppers are likely to spend at least some of that money online.

With this in mind, we thought it was about time we kicked off our first festive blog post of the season.

No doubt most of you marketers will already have your holiday-themed newsletters sussed—but what about your triggered emails?

You know: those automated messages sent to recipients following a specific action, namely: signing up to your newsletter (welcome email), looking at an item on your site (browse abandonment email), leaving an item in their basket (cart abandonment email) and actually buying something (post purchase email).

Sent when a recipient is most engaged, these emails are the ones that tend to get the highest click-through rate, so ignoring them around this time of year is akin to moaning you have nothing to wear for your Christmas party when you have at least five dresses sitting in your wardrobe—tag still on.

But we know how time and resource-starved ecommerce retailers today tend to be, which is why we’ve made an easy-to-follow list of ways you can deck out these emails in time for November.

There’s a lot to say so—to make all this information easier to absorb—we’ve looked at each campaign individually.